3.0

Average Course Rating

This course will introduce students to the components involved in writing a research paper in economics or other quantitative disciplines, by spending the semester having them writing such a paper. Early in the semester, each student will pick a topic for their paper, which will consist just of a brief description of the question (probably a topic they have studied in a previous course). As the semester progresses, the student will learn how to flesh out this germ of a topic into a full-length paper using many of the internet and other tools that are used by scholars in their own research. These include tools for exploring a topic (Google Scholar; ChatGPT; Wikipedia); compiling a bibliography of references to your subject (LitMaps; PaperPile); creating a document with appropriate content (Jupyter notebooks); project management and collaboration via GitHub; generation and incorporation of figures and tables; and the preparation of slide presentations. This will be a hands-on course: Students will bring their laptops to the lecture and the use of the tools will be taught live and interactively. Writing assignments will take the form of Jupyter notebooks (or, for any graduate student enrollees, LaTeX documents). Recommended Course Background: some familiarity with python or other modern programming languages (though having taken a formal course in such a language is not required).